9 posts from August 2017

By Fran Hawthorne: I tried not to buy anything from Amazon or Whole Foods when they were (relatively) smaller, independent companies that treated their employees horribly, fought unions, forced local merchants out of business, and (in Amazon’s case) were destroying the companies that publish my books. So why would I shop at the merged version now? Amazon’s promise of (probably temporary) lower prices at the overpriced Whole Foods is hardly a reason. That’s like Prada declaring a ten-percent-off sale.
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By Michele Lent Hirsch. “What are these scars?” the female lead, Emily, asks the guy she’s just slept with, Kumail, in an early scene in The Big Sick. I perk up in my seat when I hear the line. When the film first came out, I avoided it for weeks, afraid to see yet another slick Hollywood version of what illness supposedly looks like. But one of the most indelible memories I have—one that features prominently in my forthcoming book, Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine—is a similar question posed to me on a first date. In my case, the scar was a bright slash across my throat: the kind of mark that makes people nervous.
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The events in Charlottesville, Virginia are a frightening and disheartening reminder of how hate and intolerance in the US resurface when bigots feel empowered to act on their prejudice. Cornel West described the rally that took place on August 12 as “the biggest gathering of a hate-driven right wing in the history of this country in the last thirty to thirty-five years.” Watching the violence unfold left us feeling sorrowful and horrified.
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By Martin Luther King, Jr. This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates about freedom. This is a time for action. What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program that will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible. So far, this has only been offered by the nonviolent movement. Without recognizing this we will end up with solutions that don’t solve, answers that don’t answer, and explanations that don’t explain.
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A Q&A with Christopher M. Finan. For centuries, alcoholics were blamed for their inability to control their drinking, and it was widely assumed that alcoholism was incurable. This began to change after the founding of the Washington Temperance Society in 1840. The Washingtonians were the first national group to help alcoholics get sober, and they inspired the creation of the first institutions to provide treatment for addiction.
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By Caroline Light | Against the moral absolutism of police violence and DIY-security citizenship, the Black Lives Matter and #SayHerName movements have emerged to call out the deadly consequences of racist, classist, and (hetero) sexist violence. Beyond critiquing police violence, these movements challenge the larger structures that serve white supremacist, patriarchal power. Black Lives Matter, a network founded by three queer-identified women of color, “affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum.” This “intersectional” approach to systemic violence considers the simultaneity of identity threat for vulnerable populations, and it is profoundly threatening to the DIY-security citizenship ideal. Black Lives Matter and #SayHerName challenge the epistemic roots of inequality, as well as its maliciously antidemocratic effects.
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I have always had a passion for politics and social issues, so publishing was a natural segue. I was a history major in college, and considered a career in academia. The MBA came a few years after college. I was working my way up the ladder as a CPA at a large accounting firm when an opportunity arose at Houghton Mifflin, which was a client, for a position in corporate finance. I was intrigued at the prospect of working at a publisher involved in educational and trade publishing and interacting with creative people—going back to my liberal arts roots.
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The Chevron fire became a wake-up call for citizen action to make California refineries safer for their own workers and less harmful to air quality, community health, and the environment in general. Since August 2012, labor and community organizers have used lobbying, litigation, regulatory intervention, electoral politics, and strike activity to pursue these goals. There has been some safety enforcement progress, modest financial concessions by Big Oil, and related promises to behave better in the future. Yet, thanks to Big Oil’s legal and political clout in our nation’s second largest oil refining state, the wheels of environmental justice turn much too slowly.
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As Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color wends its way into the world after living in my computer, countless boxes in my apartment, and in my heart and mind in various forms for the past decade, I find myself in Detroit for the annual Soros Justice Fellows conference. It feels like I am in the best possible place for this moment. We are here, in part, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, which has me reflecting on the role police violence against Black women—often invisible in the retelling—played in sparking the uprising, and ongoing resistance to police violence in the Motor City.
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